THERE ARE MOMENTS when a threat creeps up on you so quietly, it triggers no alarm, like the long low swell of a tsunami far out to sea. But don’t turn your back on it because it will sweep you away when it makes landfall.
In May 2012, Vincent Gogolek, the executive director of the non-profit BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, contacted me to warn me about the proposed Animal Health Act, Bill 37, that had been tabled by the province’s agriculture minister, Don McRae. The act would make it illegal for me and others to report on viruses in farm salmon. Gogolek wrote, “The definitions are very broad and the penalties are being specially set at well beyond the level of other offences. The intention is clearly to prevent any release of information regarding disease outbreaks and to severely punish anyone who does release that information.”
In a November 10, 2011, press release with the headline “Test Results Indicate No Confirmed Cases of ISA,” Minister McRae had already refuted my findings, and had stated: “Since Premier [Christy] Clark is currently on a trade mission to China, I have personally asked her to reassure our valued trading partners that now as always BC can be relied upon as a supplier of safe, sustainable seafood.” A few months later, on March 27, 2012, McRae stood in the BC legislature to warn that Asian and US legislators were threatening to close their doors to BC farm salmon, following positive tests for salmon flu virus. “It just reminds me, as well,” he said, “that you do not want to give a nation a reason to close the border to a B.C. product without having all the facts.” His bill, if passed, would guarantee me two years in jail and a $75,000 fine if I was found to have reported any further virus results in BC farm salmon. At that moment I had over six hundred samples of farm salmon, wild salmon, eulachon and steelhead in labs for testing.
The Province newspaper wrote: “The minister said he’s having his staff look at options to deal with the perception that the new act will restrict free speech by citizens and journalists. One option would be shelving the bill until after the summer recess, he said. McRae didn’t appear to favour that option, saying an outbreak this summer could occur without the new act’s protective limits on free speech.” Indeed rumours were circulating that salmon in farms on the west coast of Vancouver Island were dying of IHN virus again, another internationally reportable pathogen.
On May 3, 2012, the provincial privacy commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, wrote to Minister McRae to warn him that his bill was “extreme” and “would override the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.” She also got the real priorities straight: “This is a matter of deep concern considering the importance of disease management.”
Twenty years earlier, senior government officials such as DFO’s director general of the Pacific Region and staff with the provincial Ministry of Environment had warned that introduction of an exotic virus was “guaranteed” if the salmon farming industry was allowed to import Atlantic salmon eggs. The threat of international trade penalties was used to silence them. Now the BC minister of agriculture was trying to arrange a prison sentence for me to stop my science, because my work was indicating that those early warnings appeared to be on target. Would the bill pass? I wondered. If it did, how long would it take to come into effect? Did I need to remove all references to test results from my blog before the vote, in case it passed and was enacted immediately? Should I find someone out of province, beyond the reach of Bill 37, to receive the upcoming lab results? Who was going to accept this risk? Was I ready to go to jail over this? Would my daughter have to finish high school without me? Who would look after my dog for two years?
Was the BC Liberal government in so deep with the salmon farming industry that it couldn’t see that this was an oppressive move? Was democracy as threatened by the presence of this virus as the wild fish?
Who are these fish farmers really?
I travelled to Victoria and took a seat in the public viewing area of the legislature to witness the vote. If the government was going to pass a law that would send me to jail for two years and plunge me into deep debt, I was going to witness the landfall of this tsunami. I had never met Premier Clark, but she and I had a moment where our eyes locked; the smile didn’t leave her face. That day, Bill 37 was never called to a vote, but it continued to linger on the order papers, like a trap ready to be used another time.
My daughter texted me, “Are you going to jail, Mom?”
“Not this time,” I texted back, along with a smiley face.
Maybe I was a little proud that the BC government thought it would take the threat of a large fine and a prison sentence to silence me.
In October 2012, the Cohen Commission released its 1,191-page final report on how Canada should respond to the collapse of the Fraser River sockeye salmon. In it were seventy-five recommendations, eleven of which were directed at the salmon farms. Justice Cohen had absorbed the evidence and he wrote that the “potential harm posed to Fraser River sockeye from salmon farms is serious or irreversible.” He admonished DFO for doing little or no research to assess the impact of salmon farms on migrating sockeye, warned of the Department’s “divided loyalties,” and suggested that management of the industry be taken away from it. He advised against placing salmon farms on wild salmon migration routes and recommended that the salmon farms in the Discovery Islands should cease to operate by September 2020 unless the federal minister of fisheries could be certain that the farms posed less than minimal risk to the sockeye and could provide the science to back that assessment up. He recommended the creation of a position in DFO at a senior management level dedicated solely to preserving wild salmon.
In the years since, very few of these recommendations have been followed, and the website hosting all the transcripts, exhibits and the final report has been shut down. I could perform no such erasure in my own mind. For me there was no going back to a time when I didn’t realize the sheer amount of disease flowing from salmon farms.